this world is not my home – i'm just passing through

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We’ve eaten momo’s, we’ve driven the motorbike, we’ve had dal bhat with fried fish at the landlord’s house.
We’re back in Nepal.

And now that we are here, I’ve realized that I’ve never shown some of the smaller, practical details of living here. Because while I’m sure most of you understand that life here is different than in, say, the Netherlands, it might be interesting to know what kinds of things we use in our daily lives here. Some are to make life better, others are to avoid diseases, and then there’s the toiletpaper bin, just because we can’t flush it down here.

As you may know, there is never 24/7 power in Nepal. We have ‘loadshedding’, which means the power is out for several hours a day. More in the winter than in the summer. Right now we don’t have power for 8 hours a day. So first I will introduce this extremely ugly thing to you, because it has made our lives better in summer AND in winter. The fan-with-battery-and-light!!

Oh, the glory. Despite its ugliness, I could kiss it. It charges when there is power and then, when the power goes out in the hot summer, and the fan stops working and the sweat starts dripping, this fan STILL works and makes everything better. And, as you may have noticed, it also has a light (the weird arm on the side – it can fold in and out and you can even twist it). It has made cooking when there is no power and no light (and the back up system down) so much easier.

Then there’s the water filter.

If you think now: why don’t you drink tap water? Then please, I beg you, do not come to Nepal until you have read up on giardia and amoebas.

When there is power, this thing filters all the crap out of our water so that we stay healthy.
PS – note the safe outlet it is plugged into.

All those power outages can give problems for electrical appliances, and we needed to protect our fridge. We got this:

Don’t ask me how it works or what it does, but our fridge works fine and I’m happy.

Here you see the thing that rules them all: THE INVERTER. I first bought one after I received a generous gift from people in the Netherlands. Because of it, we can have lights on at night when the power is out. No more working with candle light, no more shining my cellphone light to find the bathroom.
Right now they have replaced the battery which was very dead after 3 years of using it, and we upgraded so we even have light in the bedroom and dining room. The glory!

Who enjoys a cold shower? Not me! This thing is connected to a gas cylinder (with the blue hose) and heats the water. I also use it for when we wash our clothes (by hand) so it gets cleaner + my hands don’t fall off after an hour in freezing cold water.
Those gas cylinders (also one for cooking) are stored outside, locked into a serious cage, to make sure no one steals them.

Back to those diseases: there is many ways to get the dreaded explosives, and while often we don’t even know where it came from, there is another way to prevent this:

Anything that is not peeled or cooked should be soaked in water with a few drops of the brown stuff and then it’s ok to eat. It’s like magic. Because now we can eat strawberries.

And last but not least: here’s the tp bin. Blurry but you get the point.
That’s just life, in Nepal.

Disclaimer: This was written after a tough day. Not every day is tough. But some are.

Sometimes I think to myself: I wish I could ask someone how to do this immigrant-thing I’m doing right now. You know, moving to another country and making it your home and all. I wish there was someone who knows how it works. And then I realize: I am that someone. I’m the one who supposedly is an expert in this. I’ve done it twice before, after all. I should know.

But I don’t.

I know how to learn languages, but I don’t know how to learn to say things in the right tone, so that what I mean actually comes across in the right way and people don’t just understand the words I’m saying, but also my heart behind it.

I know how to make friends, but I’m surprisingly insecure when it comes to cross cultural friendships. I second guess every move I and my maybe-future-friend make, because is this a cultural thing or a personal thing and do I come across as too distant or too needy when I do this or that? Do they even WANT a new friend?

I know how to be a host, but I don’t know how to be a host in a new country where I don’t know if any aspect of the social event I planned is appropriate: the time, the reason, the food, the drinks, the music, the other guests. Because being a host means making people feel comfortable and at home, and those things matter. More than you’d think.

Well people, what can I say. It’s a process. A learning curve. A very curvy one, actually. With ups and downs and a few detours and sometimes the road seems blocked. (but it never is)

So here’s a few reminders for myself and for Sweden.

Sweden. Listen up. First of all, I’m not Swedish. So I won’t get all the social do’s and don’t and sometimes I will make you feel awkward and uncomfortable, but also sometimes I will make you laugh (in a good way) and you know what? I also have things to teach you. That’s why different cultures are so awesome. I’m not Swedish. I’m Ruth.

Secondly, what’s up with eating cake with spoons? It is, has been and always will be forks for me. Deal with it.

Then this: if I pass you on the street and I make eye contact, and you look away. WHAT’S UP WITH THAT? So even when you do that, I WILL say hej to you, loud enough so you can’t mistake it for a cough or something. You are here, I’m here, and there’s no good reason to not acknowledge that.

Lastly: it takes time. For all of us.

Sweden, you’re like a family member, like a second cousin. Vaguely familiar, sometimes charming and other times surprisingly confusing and offensive. At times I strongly dislike you, but I mainly love you.

Ever since I came to Sweden, no even before that, I’ve been talking about ass-eh-fee, also known as SFI. This stands for Svenska För Invandrare, which means Swedish For Immigrants.
When I first heard about it, I was amazed and impressed with Sweden. A language course, for FREE?? It was almost to good to be true for this language-loving-emigrant. I asked around, expecting to find out it was in fact too good to be true and that there would be some ‘snake under the grass’ (as we Dutchies say), but no, they said. It’s true. All you need is your residence permit and a personnummer.

Ha. All you need…turns out that getting that permit and personnummer took a wee bit longer than expected. But I waited, and kept telling everyone: If only I could do SFI. I can’t wait to do SFI.

But barely anyone shared my excitement. Instead, I was warned: I was too eager and too excited. SFI is mandatory for refugees, and I would be seriously disappointed with the lack of passion from the teachers, the lack of motivation from the students, and the overall lack of quality of the education.
In the end I wouldn’t even speak better Swedish, they told me. Because all you would do was talk to other foreigners and who was there to correct you?

Well, here I am, barely 2 days into SFI, and there’s enough to say already. Mainly this: I like SFI.
My classmates are Polish, Somalian, Eritrean, Iraqi, Palestinian, Syrian and Croatian. Most of them have very thick accents and names that are hard to pronounce. We have talked about ourselves and practiced grammar and helped each other out. The teacher only speaks Swedish with us.

Maybe not everyone is as motivated as I am, or it could be that they had a hard time using the computer so a nap seemed a better option.
The teacher may not have been well prepared, or it could be that she was taking her time to get to know us a bit better before she started off with her lesson plan.

Here’s what I think:

I have something to get up for in the morning, which is more than I’ve had in the last 8 months.
I get free education.
I meet interesting new people who teach me things about their country, culture and language (who knew that they use the Ge’ez script in Eritrea? Who has even heard of the Ge’ez script? I hadn’t, until yesterday).
I am forced to speak Swedish and because everyone is either teaching it or learning too, I’m not nervous about it.
And people. IT’S FREE.

Now that I have received The Magic Number, a.k.a. the number necessary to live a normal life in Sweden, a.k.a. my personnummer, I have had to call several people and organizations to sort out some things. Like my drivers license and a doctor’s appointment.

And I’m serious when I tell you that one could learn Swedish just by listening to those freaking phone-menu-systems they have. You know, where they tell you ‘If you want this and that, press 1. If you want something else, press 2. If the sky is blue, press 3. For Bulgarian, press 4.’ Etcetera.
They love them here. They love them so much that I couldn’t even manage to talk to an actual, real, breathing person when I called Transportstyrelsen with a question that didn’t quite fit the options they gave me.

Although that could have been because I don’t actually completely understand the options. Usually I try to listen for a keyword in the options and then just guess that I should press that number. Most of the times it works.

Talking about numbers – I have learned my numbers up to 20, so I can tell my phone number and personnummer when I need to. But these phone systems, they let you type in your phone number and then repeat it to you like this: ‘We will call you at five to three at number twenty-three seventy-seven …’ etc.
Seriously. I wouldn’t know if I had typed in my number wrong and they are gonna call some random person instead.

And about that call-back system. It’s all great and lovely until you have to see the doctor because of a toe fungus and they call you back right when you are buying tomatoes in a crowded Maxi. Not that that has happened to me. And I will make sure it never will. Cause that would be awkward.

It’s a funny thing, life. Just to be living here you need all these things. I need to call people and then I need to email people to remind them that I have called them and I need to fill out forms and send forms and then send an email to tell them I sent the form.

It’s just so easy to get occupied by these things. And not just the things of the now, also the things of the future.

When Jacob and I talk about the plans we have for the future, we usually come to the realization that it can’t be planned. In the end, we just don’t know. We want things, we plan things, we save up for it, but really, who knows how things will turn out? And I don’t just mean that bad things might happen. It could also be good things.

There might be blessings around the corner that we had no idea about. And when I say we, I mean you and me, and all of us.

There will be blessings coming our way that we didn’t count in in our elaborate savings system.
Blessings that we didn’t make room for in our life plans.
Because we weren’t living with open hearts and open hands.
Instead we were worrying and discussing and calculating, looking down instead of up.

I recently enrolled in a so called ‘MOOC’: a massive open online course. It’s a free course on academic writing offered by Duke University, titled ‘English Composition I – Achieving Expertise’. I am one of nearly 60,000 students from all over the world who will take part in this 12 week course.

For our first assignment we were asked to write a 300 word essay on the topic ‘I am a writer’. Here’s what I wrote.

I am a writer.

When I think of writing, I think of reading. When I was a little girl, even before I could write, I studied the signs next to the highway that said ‘exit’. I memorized the lines that made up the letters and as soon as I would get home I would get a pen and a piece of paper and reproduce them.

I was a writer!

I read everything I could, literally. No book in our house was safe. At lunch time I would read the text on the milk carton. I was hungry for words, constantly.

When I was younger, I wrote fiction. I have many notebooks filled with stories. And when I had no pen or paper around, they would still come out – I would tell my youngest brother stories during long car rides. He never wanted me to stop.

But I’m not a fiction writer. Maybe it was mainly practice. To exercise my brain in expressing myself with words.

What I love about writing is what I like to call ‘the flow’. Sometimes when I’m writing I get in the flow, and I can put the intangible thoughts and ideas in my head into words and they become real.

My recent writing has been about that: to observe the world around me, the people, the culture, and then put it into words for others to read.

I use writing to understand the world, and my place in it. I use it to put things into perspective. I use it to structure my thoughts.

For me, the biggest reward is when people appreciate my writing. When they read it and recognize it, or agree with it, or even when it upsets them. As long as they are not indifferent. And that’s why it can be so hard to write for an audience. Because my biggest fear is that my writing will not make a difference. That no one will care. That it’s just words, on a paper.